Biography

The Master of Frankfurt was born in or close to 1460; we know this because his age is given as thirty-six on The Artist and His Wife (Koninklijk Museum, Antwerp), which is dated 1496. He was active in Antwerp between 1493 and the 1520s. The master's sobriquet derives from two altarpieces originally located in Frankfurt and it was first thought that he was a German. His style, however, is that of a Netherlander. On the basis of the master's associations with the art of Jan van Eyck and Hugo van der Goes, Friedländer suggested that he came from Ghent, while Hoogewerff stressed the master's associations with Lower Rhenish art. Valentiner proposed that the master was identical with Jan de Vos, who became a member of the Antwerp Guild in 1489; Delen proposed Hendrick van Wueluwe, who entered the Guild in 1483 and died in 1533. The second hypothesis has found a greater degree of acceptance, and about fifty paintings have been attributed to the Master of Frankfurt with varying degrees of certainty.

[Hand, John Oliver, and Martha Wolff. Early Netherlandish Painting. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1986: 151.]